Tag: Alexis Tsipras

In the modern global banking system, all banks need a credit line with the central bank in order to be part of the payments system. Choking off that credit line was a form of blackmail the Greek government couldn’t refuse.

As Greek lawmakers prepare to vote on EU austerity demands attached to a new bailout, civil servants announced a 24-hour strike, and hundreds of protesters gathered in Athens to show their opposition to the terms.

In a move that looks at once like a boost for Greece’s economic cause and grounds for further complication among eurozone member countries, the International Monetary Fund on Tuesday warned that it might pull its support for the proposed bailout plan unless other nations agree to whittle down some of Greece’s debt.

Greece’s Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras on Tuesday continued the diplomatic high-wire act that his country’s economic crisis has obliged him to attempt by working hard to persuade members of the Greek Parliament and the general population to accept the bailout package he was just offered in Brussels.

By nationalizing its banks and issuing digital loans and thus restoring the liquidity desperately needed by banks and the economy, Greece could provide a model of sustainable prosperity for the world. But it is being strangled by a hegemonic power in a financial war being waged against us all.

Aside from monetary considerations, time is clearly the most important commodity in the ongoing crunch sessions between Greek and European leaders as they hash out a potential rescue strategy to keep Greece in the eurozone and out of financial free fall.

If there was any lingering question about where the majority of Greeks stood on the deal drummed up by European creditors to try to contain Greece’s ongoing financial crisis, Sunday’s referendum on the bailout package soundly dispelled it.

“There has been nothing but bad news,” writes The Guardian’s economics editor Larry Elliott of the Greek debt crisis. “Yet, through it all, the relative calm in the financial markets has reflected a belief that, despite everything, the drama Tsipras of Athens will have a happy ending.”

One of our most trenchant critics of corporate capitalism deplores the rise of an “extreme center” that has seized control of the political process and wages endless war while doing the bidding of global corporations. Our only hope, he says, is revolt.

After the financial troika triumphed over the Greek government in debt negotiations last week, Germany’s veteran minister “indulged himself with some patronizing comments,” observed economics correspondent Phillip Inman at The Guardian.

Greece’s anti-austerity party has declared itself willing to sign the leaked “Moscovici document,” which a central committee member says defangs the Greek government in its struggle against its creditors.

Alexis Tsipras, the leader of Syriza, would like to pretend that austerity and the euro are two different things. Apparently, he’s blissfully ignorant of the history of the euro. The horror of austerity is not the consequence of Greek profligacy: It was designed into the euro’s plan from the beginning.

Leftist Greek lawmaker Alexis Tsipras says austerity for his country and other hurting European nations is a form of blackmail intended to build a new Continental economy based on cheap labor, deregulation, reduced public spending and tax benefits for the wealthy.

New Democracy leader Antonis Samaras faces a daunting task after his pro-euro party won the Greek elections over the weekends: form a coalition government in three days, and do it without the help of the party that finished second in the vote.